Category: Productivity

Two years ago, when I quit the competitive life to embrace the creative life, I went full throttle on several creative projects.

I wrote prolifically to populate my website, dusted a three-year-old manuscript, started working on it, joined multiple courses, started writing on Medium, commenced a Substack newsletter, and began a publication.I am not working, I told myself. I have no excuse to slack. My output should be double or triple as before.

On the contrary, my productivity dropped, and I reached a near burnout stage.

I tend to overcommit to the extent that I become obsessed with productivity. I worked more than ten hours a day and still couldn’t finish the tasks I had assigned myself. I was continually stressed, exhausted, and feeling un-creative.

I didn’t know what to do; until I read Anna McGovern’s story.

Six years ago, Anna McGovern was struggling like me. Working full time as a digital producer, she raised three children and took care of her aging father, and later on, when he passed away, dealing with the grief.

She recognized that she had “done a bit too much for a bit too long.” She needed things to be different. Although she would have loved to pack her bags and travel, the family commitment wouldn’t allow that to happen. Instead, she decided to take one day a week off work, during which she listened to the radio, flicked through magazines, and slowly worked her way through minor DIY projects.

A couple of months into her new routine, McGovern realized that what she was doing could only be described as pottering.

Such was the restorative powers of pottering that she decided to research the activity further and ended up writing a book about it — Pottering: A Cure for Modern Life.

What is Pottering?

A peculiar British pastime, pottering is any gentle activity – that could be done in the home or outside, without a definite plan or purpose, where you meander from one thing to another.

Potter about, in short, is the thing which we should all be doing. It might seem like a total time-waster when being productive every minute of the day has been drilled into our psyche, yet it is the thing that makes us most productive. It gives the mind a break it needs from the continuous demand we make of it.

“I think you can lose yourself entirely while you’re pottering. It’s a mental break. It’s completely unpressured and it frees you momentarily from all responsibility. It may seem inconsequential, but it has a uniquely restful effect, which I only discovered by chance.” — Anna McGovern

But not every activity can be pottering.

Although there are no hard and fast rules pottering does have some characteristics.

It has to be something you enjoy.

Mike Powell loves doing dishes. He called it a welcome ritual, a ballast against the chaos of the everyday. (His article in New York Times is worth a read.)

A friend of mine loves cleaning her fridge. The act of wiping the glass shelves, arranging the bottles in the door in height order, and arranging the vegetables in transparent boxes in the bottom drawer is her thing. My sister-in-law finds peace when she is ironing. Give her a stack of clothes, and she is a happy bee.

One person’s pottering may be another person’s domestic drudgery. If ironing clothes, doing laundry, and mopping floors do nothing for you, it is not pottering.

Improvisation is the key.

Pottering is different than a hobby. You don’t need to learn a new skill or make something. Pottering is about making the best of your circumstances and the resources you have to hand. Being inventive and making do with things at hand is the key. If you have something to mend, and it can keep your finger moving, it is pottering. But if you have to follow a pattern and make a dress that fits you, it is not pottering.

“The distinguishing feature of pottering as opposed to ‘jobs around the house’ is the slow pace at which you do it,” claims McGovern.

Pottering is not glamorous.

You don’t have to put too much effort in, go very far, or even do it with others. It is not a lifestyle concept, and it doesn’t require practice.

Unlike mindfulness, there is no technique to be mastered.

First and foremost, “a chance to have a moment free of responsibility and free of the tyranny of pressure.”

Bring in some movement.

Pottering also implies movement, but not a lot of movement. Slow, light, fluid motion is what is called for. Movement causes a “cascade effect.” The unplanned, improvised sequence can send you into a “meditative state.” Once you are in this state of flow, you feel the calm set in. You live in the moment, just like in a bird or a fish who are satisfied in whatever state of being they are.

For movement, think of Buddhist monks making mandalas. There is something utterly soothing and meditative about making intricate patterns with slow fluid movements.

You can’t try too hard.

Another characteristic of pottering is not trying too hard. “There is no such thing as ‘doing it well,’” McGovern writes, reassuringly. “There are no benchmarks for success… no one is judging your performance when you find a matching lid and plastic pot in the odd assortment of containers you use for freezing leftover food. It’s just not something you can ‘excel’ at.”

There is nothing ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ way to potter about. And since no one is there to judge, there is no pressure on you to get it right.

While you can’t fail or succeed at pottering, embracing the act can help you flourish. — Lana Hall, Psychologist at Sage & Sound

Pottering is not ‘doing nothing.’

Sitting around on your phone or watching a box set isn’t pottering. Neither is surfing on the internet or social media scrolling. Being digital-free means, you are not bombarded with messages, new information, advertisements. It means you have some time in a day that is truly yours.

Pottering is relaxing precisely because you are occupied in the gentlest of ways.

“It’s as though you’ve lent a sheen of legitimacy to your unstructured downtime by doing something ever so slightly useful.” — Anna McGovern

Leaving something to soak, executing a minor repair on clothing, rearranging objects on a shelf are all prime examples of this.

How does pottering help with productivity?

There is a lot to be said for the satisfaction you gain from pottering, but pottering can help productivity by engaging the creative brain.

Often, when we are on the go, to be productive, we are, in fact, standing in our own way. Here are a few ways pottering help with productivity:

• Pottering helps to hit the pause button. It enables us to pause and let things fall into place. It is a way of making the unconscious mind find solutions to problems.
• When our brains are busy, we stay in a “stress response,” which leads to exhaustion and burnout. Pottering gives our brain a break allowing us to process and integrate our experiences in a way we can’t when we’re on the go. So when we come back to the task, we come back renewed and rejuvenated.
• Moments of inspiration tend to happen when our bodies are busy, but our minds are not. When we take a break and engage in some apparently mindless activities like walking, knitting, or shoveling snow, creativity kicks in. We are much more productive when we are in a creative state of mind than in a competitive state of mind.

Pottering is one of the coping strategies that you can do when you feel a bit frazzled. It is one of the things in the armory of self-care that happens to fit in with how we are living now.

How have I incorporated pottering in my life?

I used to give work the first preference and fun and relaxation as the filler activities between work commitments. Now I have turned the other way around. I now prioritize life over work.

I walk, clean the fridge, wipe crumbs off the cutlery drawer, and arrange plastic containers in a particular way. I iron clothes till there are no more, take photos of the neighbor’s flowers when going for walks and sketch them when I get home.

I flick through books like one flick through magazines with no pressure to finish them. All hangers in my wardrobe face the same way, all towels in my linen cupboard are folded facing the same way. I fold my underclothes as Marie Kondo teaches in her videos, and I fold my tops and bottoms in packets so they can be stored in an upright manner.

What difference has it made?

I am happier. I am not rushed. I still get the same amount of work done but in an unrushed way.

Now I plan less and reflect more. I am a different person, much more pleasant to be with.

Do I feel guilty?

I don’t.

Because pottering has made me happier than ticking items off my to-do list ever did.

Weekends were meant to be for pottering, and yet, since working from home started with the pandemic, we have filled them with work too.

We need to allocate at least one day of the week to potter about. Sundays can be those days.

But if you can’t devote a whole day to pottering, don’t stress. Even a few minutes of “micro-pottering” can offer peace. My favorite micro-pottering activity is lying down on a picnic rug in my backyard and watching the clouds pass by while listening to my neighbor’s water cascade.

What is your pottering activity?

If you haven’t any, why not start something.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

I did it again. After my near burnout experience, I worked way beyond my capacity and fell in the bed exhausted and devastated. I still hadn’t finished my work. I kept on going back to the computer to keep editing the article, but it wasn’t making any sense. 

I admire the writers who write an article a day. Some even manage two to three articles a day. I want to become like them. But it will take me years to get there. If I try, I might be able to do that for a few weeks, but I won’t sustain it. 

A lot of accomplished writers on Medium advise writing an article a day. It is great advice if you are a seasoned writer. It is not hard to churn out an article a day if you have been writing for a couple of years or more. 

And it is true that the more you write, the easier it becomes. 

How?

• You have more to say. Your thinking becomes clear, and you build on your previous advice.
• Your sentence structure improves. Writing every day gives you fluency with sentence construction, which inturns make it say to express your thoughts.
• The narrator in you is always on. It takes a while for my narrative voice to turn on when I write articles on alternate days. But if I write every day, the narrator in me stays on. It starts seeing a story in everything.

But what if you can’t write every day? What if you are still struggling with coming up with valuable content to write every day? What if you are close to burning out? 

The pacing could be a solution then.

What is Pacing?

Let me explain pacing with a story:

In 1911, two teams arrived in Antarctica with the same goal — become the first to reach the South Pole. Roald Amundsen from Norway and Robert Scott from the UK led two different teams to win the south pole’s race.

Both managed to reach the pole. But Amundsen won the race and reached 34 days earlier than Scott. 

The worst bit? Scott and 4 of his teammates died on the return journey — just 18km away from their food depot.

A lot of comparisons have been made on both teams’ approaches. Books have been written on it in great detail. The spots they choose as their base camps. Dogs vs. ponies. Amundsen used dogs while Scott used ponies. Since dogs can bear cold weather better than ponies, Amundsen could leave 11 days earlier for the expedition, while Scott had to wait for the weather to become warmer. 

Sleds vs. skis. Scott took 3 motor sleds on the expedition, but all 3 broke down very soon. Amundsen focused on making sure everyone on his team knew how to ski well.

Scott’s team was malnourished, and many faced scurvy because of a lack of vitamin C in their diet. Amundsen’s team actually gained weight during their expedition.

But the most significant difference in both their approaches was the pacing of their expedition.

Amundsen made sure his team kept a constant pace of covering between 24–32 km per day. Even if the weather were good, he would not go further. 

On the other hand, Scott pushed and trekked as far as 73 km in a single day when the weather and terrain were perfect. The ponies got extremely tired, and they couldn’t cover the average distance the next day.

While on individual good days, Scott could push and cover a lot more ground than Amundsen, overall, his pace was much slower!

It turned out that Amundsen was not only a much better planner than Scott, but he understood that the pacing was the key to coming back alive. 

The slow tortoise beat the faster hare because the hare was inconsistent in its pacing. Steady wins.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

The American Navy Seal has the saying — slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. 

If you see how elite infantry moves through a battlefield, you’ll notice that they never run. Compare them with not so well trained militia who sprints into the battle.

When things go wrong, the faster moving militia has to scamper to take cover. Their supply lines break up. And they fail to hold on to their land. 

The sure-footed elite infantry, while moving slowly, achieves their win a lot quicker.

Jim Collins tells a tale of a similar competition in his book Great by Choice. In the 1980s, computer chip maker AMD set an audacious goal to grow by 60%. To achieve their goal, they borrowed heavily. And when things didn’t go as per plan, they had to scamper to pay their debt. They almost went bankrupt, while the more sure-footed Intel took the lead!

How do you pace yourself?

Long-distance marathon runners are taught that they will lose two minutes in the second half for every minute they run faster than their average speed in the first half of their race. They need to learn to pace themselves. They need to learn to keep a constant speed even when they are not as tired early on in the race. Because for the latter part of the race, they will have the added advantage of the endorphin rush.

The way they learn to pace themselves is by understanding their bodies during the training period. They are taught to focus on their heart rate while running — to gauge their perceived exertion while running. And to slow down appropriately. They need to be able to run without huffing and puffing!

They are given the guideline always to perform less than their best capacity. 

During training, new runners are told to run a mile as fast as they can. That is their magic mile. And then, over a long distance, they are taught to run two to three minutes slower than their magic mile.

You have to understand that pacing means undershooting your best performance. 

It means doing things without exertion.

How to apply that to article writing?

Find out your peak performance by measuring how many articles you can write in a week. Then and slowing down from there. 

If you can write two articles a week comfortably, then write one article a week. This is the exact opposite of pushing yourself to do your best. It never works in the long run. And you reach your exhaustion point very soon. Once you are tired or burnt out, it takes a long time to recover. 

Besides, your mind stores the unpleasant memory, and resistance develops, which is again very hard to overcome.

Pacing is all about understanding your capabilities and managing your energy.

Tom Kuegler, a well-established Medium writer, wrote an article last week saying he will quit online writing one day because he is tired. I don’t blame him; he has been writing five articles a week for many years. 

So what is the antidote?

Pace yourself. 

Whenever you feel like sprinting, think of Hare and Tortise’s story. 

Whenever you feel like racing to achieve your goal, think of Amundsen and pace yourself.

Understand that pacing about managing your energy—it about knowing your best performance and doing less than that. Only then will you be able to do it consistently.

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Stories courtesy of Ankesh Kothari of Zenstrategies. 

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Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

Every year, I spend the last week of December contemplating the year that has passed and planning the next one. I set goals and write them in my daily diary where they are in front of my eyes all the time.

This year I decided to go one step further and created the Author Business Plan to stay on track and don’t get distracted by other exciting things. 

I started in the last week of December, as usual, but didn’t finish till the first week of January, and there was a reason for that.

Something happens when the clock strikes twelve on New Year Eve. 

All that was current becomes past in a moment. 

Your perspective changes. 

The New Year’s energy brings several possibilities, and wisdom gained in the past year helps you avoid repeating the same mistakes. 

A typical Author Business Plan has five components — Business Summary, Financial Goals, Products, Publishing, and Marketing Strategy.

My Author Business Plan has different components. They are not standard, rather than based on what matters to me at this stage of life. They may not apply to you. Feel free to choose your own components. I wholeheartedly recommend Joanne Penn’s book Author Business Plan, which I used as a model to draft mine.

Let’s not forget I am turning sixty this year. Some of the things that matter to me may not be a priority for you. But then some things are universal.

Let’s get into it.

Theme

From last year, instead of setting annual goals, I started setting a theme. I wrote an article about it – Don’t set goals, set a theme instead. I urge you to read it. I promise it is worth your time.

Where goals are rigid, limiting, and unforgiving, themes are fluid, merciful, and open up new opportunities. 

With a goal, the question is, have you achieved it or not? Whereas with a theme, every action you do, you need to ask: Is this aligned with my theme?

Goal setting leaves you miserable. If you don’t achieve them, you beat yourself up, and if you do achieve them, you set another one as soon as possible.

On the other hand, themes give you achievable, meaningful daily standards you can live up to. They reduce the pressure goals create. 

A goal shuts out opportunities for current fulfillment in favor of a distant payday. A theme looks for opportunities in the present.

Last year my theme was FOCUS. 

I focused on learning various skills and on whatever things I was doing. The theme kept my wandering nature in check.

This year my theme is CREATE. 

I will enjoy the process of creation by using the skills I learned last year.

Guiding Principle

A guiding principle is an overarching principle that helps you decide what to do and what not to do?

Pick a phrase or a theme and say like, ‘At the end of my life, what do I want my actions from today to have contributed to?’

For me, that statement is, “Make sure my creativity injects hope in this world.”

The Bare Minimum

I have always been an overachiever. I will set up so many goals, so many projects, and so many endeavors that it would become physically impossible for me to accomplish them all. Then I will beat myself up for not achieving those. 

On top of that, I love spontaneity in my day. I get easily inspired and want to act on new ideas as soon as they appear. New ideas have certain energy associated with them, and if you don’t act on them immediately, they go flat like a bubble. At this stage in my life (I will be turning sixty soon), I want to follow whim rather than discipline.

This year, I will identify the bare minimum things I want to achieve and leave the rest of the time for spontaneity.

These bare minimum things are:

1. Finish my novel.
2. Publish six ebooks (already in draft)
3. Write 3–5 articles a week
4. Continue once a week newsletter A Whimsical Writer.
5. Draw 4–5 sketches a week

Three of these goals are weekly, one bi-monthly, and one annual. I will be able to achieve these easily. The rest of my time is for me to do whatever I please. 

I might run a webinar course, start a podcast and post on social media every day for 90 days, or start doing urban sketching. These things can come and go. I will be happy if I could achieve the five bare minimum things I have identified.

Health

In 2020 I ignored my health. I stopped going to the gym when lockdown started and didn’t start properly even when gyms opened mid-year (we have been lucky here in Canberra). I ate mindlessly and put on weight. To tell the truth, I ignored health for writing. I was so consumed with following my writing goals that I didn’t make time for exercise.

This year, heath is going to come first. I am back to walking 3–4 times a week, doing weights 2–3 times a week, core training 1–2 times a week, and yoga class once a week.

I have joined WW to be accountable for my weight and investigate intermittent fasting to control my eating.

Time Off

Not being able to travel led to non-stop working in 2020. I took no breaks other than a month off in February. This impacted my sanity and perspective. This year I have blocked two weeks each quarter. Even if we couldn’t travel, I will take time off to do nothing. And if travel became possible, I intend to take longer breaks in the second half of the year.

This is how the overall plan looks like:

I am sharing it here for two reason, one to keep myself accountable to my readers and two to give you a template to write your plan if you haven’t got one.

Happy planning!

May you have a productive and safe 2021!

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

I finally sent the book to the editor. And I had the rare opportunity to bask in the afterglow of finishing a project I have been working on for weeks now.

This “completion elation” surprised me a little. I was not working on it all the time. After the first week had passed, and I had compiled most of the material, it was hard to stay focused on it. The initial energy of the idea had gone. I wanted to do everything else but the project on hand.

I am becoming more and more convinced that in today’s age of too many choices (and distractions), we should finish any project as quickly as possible. There are too many new things all the time demanding our attention.

We spend too much time on a project because we want a certain degree of perfection. But often, perfection leads to procrastination.

Completion of something permits you to choose something else to take its place. That is why it is so important to finish that thing that you have started or had been on your list for a long time.

Procrastination not only fills you with guilt and self-loathing but also denies you the opportunity to move on other fun things that come next.

Get that monkey off your back.

Here is what you can do. Pick one thing that you have been postponing or slogging away for some time. Use the WOOP technique (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan) to identify those obstacles and plan how to overcome those. Then forge ahead with new momentum. Finish it as quickly as you can.

Don’t aim for perfection, Go for completion.